From a college dropout to a $54 billion fortune — the incredible rags-to-riches story of Oracle founder Larry Ellison

As a child, Larry Ellison's adoptive father repeatedly told him that he was good for nothing. The tech entrepreneur has proven him wrong.
AP Photo/Dean Purcell
As a child, Larry Ellison's adoptive father repeatedly told him he was good for nothing, according to Fortune.

When Ellison was born in 1944, his mother was unmarried, according to a profile in Fortune. She gave him to relatives to raise, and Ellison never met his biological father.

He dropped out of college twice— first from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then the University of Chicago — before moving to California and working odd jobs.

In his oral history, he recalled, "I never took a computer science class in my life. I got a job working as a programmer; I was largely self-taught. I just picked up a book and started programming."

When Ellison landed a programming job at Ampex Corporation, one of his responsibilities at the company was building a database for the CIA, Business Insider's Madeline Stone notes. In 1977, he and two coworkers left Ampex to start a database management company of their own.

Larry Ellison grew up in a working-class family in Chicago after his mother gave him to relatives to raise.YouTube screenshot

Their ploy worked. Oracle's first customer was a big one: the CIA. Their product later became the most popular database ever sold. That success paid off for Ellison — according to the Wall Street Journal, he was the highest-paid executive in the US before he stepped down as CEO in 2014.

Ellison says his wealth is "surreal."
Reuters
But becoming a billionaire was never his goal, he told the Smithsonian Institution. "When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich."

Now 70, Ellison has a lifestyle that he could only have dreamed of during his working-class Chicago childhood.

"This is all kind of surreal," he told Mike Wilson, the author of "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison." "I don't even believe it now. Not only did I not believe it when I was 14, but when I look around, I say, this must be something out of a dream."